The choice of aliens

The inhabitants of Kal5 had not seen beings resembling those on the blue-green planet.

They had self-replicating mechanism that didn't include the replication for the information contained within each individual! Which meant each individual had a different set of priors, and probably entirely different models to begin with. It was a surprise they'd even made it that far, considering all the information learned about the world and universe would have to be communicated manually over generations with each other, not something you got in your inherited biological material for free. And that also meant that the memories of ancients could be inaccurate, if the transcription and interpretation of the events were less than perfect. Biology was quite insufficient at doing that already, how could they have devised ways to match anything even close to that.

And yet, and yet, they were quite successful, these beings of the planet, for they had sent in probes to external planetary bodies, had hundreds of thousands of probes rotating their planet. For communication and sensing, no doubt. When you could get memories and details of past happenings through biological material you didn't worry about communication too much...it was bound to eventually come to you anyway and it was unlikely to have been severely damaged. And if it was, so what, you'd get multiple versions of it through various people, and you'd have successfully recreated a hi-fidelity version of the events, even though the individuals who passed the knowledge to you may have had lesser knowledge than you.

Communicating that way must have its charms though. You didn't just 'get' them...you had to make an effort, and it was possible your priors and experiences were so different, you didn't get them at all, their interpretations and understandings were nonsensical to you. That possibility excited them for it had been a common complaint in Kal5...you wanted to be angry and mad at other people, but when you got their memories and the data they had and the mental model, it all seemed so...obvious, even if you'd have yourself made a different choice, it made sense what the person at the time had done, and how anyone else might have done the same thing. They didn't like thinking too much about the deterministic nature of the universe, but questions such as these had previously come up, before the dealer documents had been drawn up, and at least one of the parties but ideally both the parties concerned would have given a reasonable amount of consent. It was hard to fight with people like that, no matter what. It would be a concern of shame to truly empathize with someone and yet hate them for the choices they made.